Football might not be coming home, but common-sense politics in the UK might
The French have a phrase for it: “C’est plus fort que moi.” It’s probably best translated as: “Sorry, I can’t help myself.” When you hear it in France, you can often stand by for some piece of prejudice, or even bigotry, such as “sorry about this, but I just can’t stand Arabs”. So, since you probably already have an idea where this is going, I’ll just dive right in.
As far as I’m concerned, soccer is a foreign game. On a good day, I have mixed memories of the Christian Brothers, but I still agree with one brother who long ago scathingly summed up soccer as “dribblin’ the ball along the ground apin’ the English”.
More attentive readers will note that I call that carry-on “soccer”, never football. Where I come from football means Gaelic football – a flawed game, I reckon, but it’s still ours.
I know the ban on “foreign games” ended in May 1971, a time when coincidentally I attended my first rugby game in Thomond Park, Limerick. I well remember the slagging by the alickadoos of renowned local GAA players who, as everyone agreed, no longer had to sneak in wearing dark glasses with their coat collars turned up.
Growing up in Limerick city, one quickly learns that rugby is the polar opposite of foreign, in large part because it was, and still is, a working person’s game. Playing, watching and supporting rugby in Limerick is like drawing oxygen and can never be deemed foreign.
But that soccer carry-on is a very different kettle of fish. Sorry, but over half a century after the end of the GAA ban, it’s still a foreign game in my book. Just can’t help myself.
Yet, staying in confessional mode, I will admit I have caught myself watching snatches of those soccer European Championship games in recent days. It started with casual glances at televisions in public houses.
We were warned from childhood about such temptations, as we were about backing horses, drinking beer and going upstairs in the bus, but to no avail. Now it has progressed, or perhaps regressed, to me looking at the Euro soccer fixtures and contemplating taking in large chunks of games, and maybe eventually entire matches, especially when they involve France, Italy, Spain or Portugal.
This has provoked a crisis to confront even my rather topsy-turvy code of values. But I have reached a compromise with myself which has assuaged my conscience, even if it is not entirely at ease.
You see, since soccer is a foreign game, surely foreigners are well entitled to play it. And, as an ardent Europhile and internationalist, surely that entitles yours truly to watch them going at it.
Let’s also stress that this is not championship hurling, nor even a 41st cousin of it. So, I know this soccer dalliance will only be a passing strange thing.
It reminds me of a lovely neighbour from my childhood. Seán O’Connor was a gifted hurler and footballer who referees Munster finals and many All-Irelands.
In the days of the ban, he laughingly absolved himself for watching big soccer matches on television on grounds that it was “entertainment and never sport”. My sentiments entirely, and let’s add the key word “foreign”, making the full phrase “foreign entertainment”.
So, I’m glad I’ve cleared that one up. And, before I quit the confession box, let me tell you about another delight attached to that foreign game as played by foreigners right now.
It is reading and watching English media coverage – and I mean English and not British – of this soccer competition. Anybody got the stamina to count how many big European and world soccer competitions there have been since 1966, the last time England won the soccer World Cup and anything else really?
Even with me going soft on soccer, I could not do that. But I can say with conviction that they have not won anything very much in the past 58 years.
Still, every time a competition like the current one kicks off, the English sports media go into some kind of collective soccer jingoism implying that “Johnny Foreigner” will get his sporting comeuppance. We know they are only storing up so much national heartbreak.
The English claim they somehow invented the world game that is soccer is at best tenuous. It rests on the “English Football Association” being formed in 1863, some years ahead of most other nations.
The foundation date of the Gaelic Athletic Association in 1884 is a good guideline year, as most key sports across the western world began organising, rule-standardising and co-ordinating around that date.
But since a child will by nature kick a stone, a can, a pig’s bladder or rag bundle, pretty well reflexively, how likely is it that the sole origin of soccer can be England?
Yet our once all-powerful and sometimes imperial neighbour is going through a very tough time right now.
We could even claim we can’t help ourselves gloating over that one. But the reality is we can help ourselves and repel that gloating impulse as corrosive and unhelpful to all since our Irish and British fortunes are so intertwined.
Far better to hope that a new UK Labour government will soon help guide everyone in these islands towards better times.
‘Anybody got the stamina to count how many big European and world soccer competitions there have been since 1966, the last time England won the soccer World Cup and anything else really?’